Marked on 22 April each year, Earth Day is a reminder to celebrate the natural environment and to pat ourselves on the back for our efforts to protect it. Alongside the usual recycling, composting and picking up other people’s litter, I spent it admiring the early blooms in our garden wildflower meadows and the newts…
The history of mental health care is littered with discarded treatments revealing the practitioners to be barely more rational than the patients. One fad that seduced me for a short time when I worked as a clinical psychologist was ‘earplug therapy’ for people who heard unwanted voices. Wacky as it seems, there was solid research…
I came across the name Anne Lister as I was researching my novel-in-progress, a subversive retelling of Jane Eyre. Born in 1791, Anne Lister was a pioneering Yorkshire landowner, businesswoman, traveller and mountaineer. She was also a secret diarist commonly considered the first modern lesbian, unkindly nicknamed Gentleman Jack. Although her sexuality, and her independent…
Although lockdown literature is not – yet – officially a genre, I’m not the only author who found inspiration in the changes wrought by the Covid pandemic. In my recent guest post for Shiny New Books, I’m sharing my reflections on some of the novels I read as I was drafting and editing mine. I’m…
